A New Witness to the Ancient Way

For well over a decade now, American evangelicals have been experiencing a renaissance—or to be more precise, a naissance—of interest in ancient Christianity. This awakening to the Great Tradition has been several decades in the making; however, its recent growth has been dramatic, and is demonstrated by a marked surge of interest in early Christian literature,[1] by a corresponding increase in the use of liturgical forms in evangelical worship,[2] and by a burgeoning interest among younger evangelicals in liturgical and sacramental traditions.[3] The great spiritual and theological impulse of the Reformation was a return to the early Christian sources—ad fontes—and a similar spirit has enlivened the theological and spiritual imaginations of many late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century evangelicals.[4]

Whatever the outcome of this “paleo-orthodox”[5]ressourcement for evangelicals, I believe it is a movement of significant import which merits significant theological reflection. Having been engaged in it for roughly twenty years, I am deeply sympathetic with the best of what it proffers to American evangelicals—and ultimately to all Christian traditions—and believe it constitutes a “new witness” to the way of Jesus Christ for reasons which the remainder of this paper will delineate.

But Webber remained undaunted and continued to write and publish vigorously in evangelical circles, especially on the subject of Christian worship. The consistent theme of his writing throughout the eighties and nineties was to emphasize the primacy of the ancient Christian liturgical tradition as the stratum in which contemporary evangelical worship must be grounded if is to be biblically, theologically and spiritually coherent. Seeking to capture the postmodern shift among younger evangelicals, Webber returned in the late nineties to his broader message of evangelical ressourcement of the fathers through the Ancient-Future book series published by Baker Academic Press.

By all human accounts, Webber appears to have succeeded. Today, one can witness the incorporation of ancient liturgical practices into many evangelical worship services across a whole spectrum of denominations. This incorporation may range anywhere from an eclectic and seemingly ad hoc inclusion of discrete elements—such as the use of candles, passing of the peace or the sursum corda—to the wholesale adoption of entire liturgical rites and rubrics, most commonly taken from the Book of Common Prayer. And Webber's Ancient-Future concept appears to have made a substantial impact, especially among younger evangelical leaders, and has been taken up and promulgated by many in both mainstream evangelical churches and emerging churches.[6]

But this is only part of the story. Also during the 1970s, United Methodist theologian Thomas Oden had begun to read the church fathers and underwent a radical reorientation of his theology and faith, such that he turned his back on the Bultmannian-Tillichian synthesis of his earlier years and embraced the ancient theological consensus of creedal Christianity. Out of this conversion Oden wrote his 1979 Agenda for Theology, which called theologians out of their modernist presumptions and back to the classic roots of the Christian theological consensus in the church's first thousand years. Oden made good on his word in the 1980s by composing a three-volume systematic theology comprised almost entirely of pre-modern, mainly patristic voices and broadly organized around the Nicene Creed. This work gained substantial popularity, especially in conservative Wesleyan and Methodist seminaries and colleges, and is still widely used today. However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Oden made his appearance on the evangelical center stage with his revised edition of Agenda for Theology entitled After Modernity, What?, which included a forward by evangelical statesman J. I. Packer. This book was widely read and digested by evangelical pastors and theologians and granted Oden a platform from which to speak into the evangelical world, eventually leading him to become a senior editor for Christianity Today.

These achievements notwithstanding, it was in the 1990s that Oden made his most significant contribution to the awakening of evangelicals to the Great Tradition. In 1995, Oden launched the 29-volume Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, an anthology of patristic commentary on the entirety of the Bible. This work is published by InterVarsity Press and to date has sold in excess of 500,000 copies, with over 80% of sales going to the evangelical market and the final volume still awaiting publication. Realizing that once fallow fields were now ripe for the harvest, other evangelical publishers quickly followed suit with their own projects of patristic retrieval. Followed by younger evangelical scholars such as Jeffrey Bingham, Christopher Hall, and Daniel Williams, and behind them a veritable generation of younger evangelical patristics scholars, Tom Oden has been a true pioneer of the ressourcement of ancient Christianity among American evangelicals.

Finally, I think it extremely important to recognize two additional non-evangelical figures who were profoundly influential in the awakening of American evangelicals to the ancient Christian tradition, especially at the popular level: Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa. The dual impact of these remarkable individuals in rehabilitating the face of Roman Catholicism in the perception of American evangelicals simply cannot be underestimated. The holiness of their lives and deep authenticity of their piety convinced an entire generation of evangelicals, despite their continued doctrinal reservations, that “Catholics can be Christians, too.”

Of course, there are other contributing figures and factors further in the background of the awakening of American evangelicals to the Great Tradition. The Wesleyan and Methodist stream of evangelicalism has always, I would contend, evinced a relatively greater degree of ecumenical openness, and the persistent influence of British evangelical Anglicanism—a la J. I. Packer, John Stott and, yes, C. S. Lewis—has always carried with it a greater degree of sacramental, liturgical and historic consciousness, even if bare bones by comparison to other non-evangelical traditions. In addition, we must take into account what Donald Dayton refers to as the embourgoisement of American evangelicals in the course of the 20th century. The generational movement from farming and working class to an increasingly educated upper middle class has inevitably produced a generation of evangelicals who are more aware of their theological and religious options—not to mention their economic and political options—than were their parents and grandparents. Finally, the larger postmodern epistemological and cultural context of the latter third of the 20th century must also be taken into account, as traditional boundaries of national, ethnic and religious identity have become increasingly diffuse and porous.

However, I believe these factors to be the backdrop and setting for the key dramatis personae in this particular narrative. And it is remarkable to note the way in which the lives and works of these individuals have coincided, almost as if by design. Webber and Oden experienced their respective awakenings in the seventies, entirely independent of one another, at the very time when John Paul II and Mother Teresa were rising to global prominence in their own right: John Paul II was elected to the papacy in 1978 and Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The popular impact of these two prominent Roman Catholics, and the theological impact of Oden and Webber through their years of teaching and publication, combined (in my opinion) to create a perfect storm of awakening, especially among the generation of American evangelicals that came of age in the 1980s and 90s.

Catholic Evangelicalism

The outcome of these developments is such that today, amid the bewildering varieties of American evangelicalism, there exists a subset that can rightly be referred to as “catholic evangelicals.” While a handful of such creatures may have existed thirty years ago, their numbers have swelled to sufficient proportions today that I believe it justified to refer to them as a genuine “movement.” Granted, these numbers may not rival those of the New Calvinists and certainly not the Old Baptists, but they are growing steadily, especially among younger evangelicals. Within the evangelical Anglican churches in the immediate environs of Wheaton College—one of which I minister in—one to two hundred Wheaton students may be found in attendance every Sunday morning—as much as 10% of the undergraduate population. And among Wheaton faculty, roughly ten percent attend Anglican churches. To the degree that Wheaton is a representative cross-section of American evangelicalism, these numbers are significant.[7]

The fact that these churches are Anglican is also significant. That many catholic evangelicals have become Anglican should come as no surprise, since so few options exist for them within the Protestant world. There has always been an evangelical presence (broadly understood) within the Anglican tradition, often in tension with its Anglo-Catholic counterparts but never absent. And the influence of British evangelical Anglicanism, as we have already noted, has continued to be a small but significant aspect of the American evangelical context, especially during the 20th century. The original Inter-Varsity Press was a British publisher and we have already mentioned the influence of Packer, Stott and Lewis. And finally, the theological path between Anglicanism and its wayward Wesleyan and Methodist offspring—which comprise a major portion, if not the majority of American evangelicals—is one easily trodden. For all these reasons, the Anglican tradition is the one most accessible to American evangelicals who wish to move beyond liturgical eclecticism, both because it is most familiar and, perhaps more importantly, because it remains Protestant. I will comment more on the Protestant point later.

But what does it mean to be a catholic evangelical, Anglican or otherwise? What are the characteristics of this movement, and what are its core commitments? A variety of options face us at this juncture, for the designation of “catholic evangelical” is sufficiently broad to include individuals and groups across denominational lines and theological emphases. Consequently, while I might be inclined to speak, for example, of apostolicity and the threefold office of bishop, priest and deacon, there are catholic evangelicals who would not. However, there are certain core values that demarcate this movement, values that mainly have to do with Christian worship. And this should come as no surprise, since it is in worship—Christian or otherwise—that the chief values of any religious tradition are most clearly to be seen. Consequently, the remainder of this paper will focus primarily, though not exclusively, upon catholic evangelical worship.

At their most consistent and theologically articulate, I believe the chief values of catholic evangelicalism to include the following: First, catholic evangelicals prize catholicity. This means that they understand themselves as heirs to, and participants in, the whole of the Christian tradition, not only in its first, relatively unified one thousand years but also in its latter, contested and fractious one thousand years. It means that they see themselves as existing in relation to their separated brethren from Orthodox, Roman Catholic and all Creed-affirming Protestant churches, their real doctrinal and ecclesial differences notwithstanding. As such, they affirm the normative character of the seven ecumenical councils with emphasis upon the first four, and understand the Trinitarian and Christological consensus of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and Definition of Chalcedon to be preeminent, normative statements both for the right interpretation of Scripture and for demarcating the boundaries for all subsequent Christian dogma. As Lewis famously stated, “In the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes . . .”[8] Catholic evangelicals not only accept the truth of this statement, but embrace its inherently ecumenical implications.

Second, catholic evangelicals prize the liturgical life of the Great Tradition. They gratefully receive the forms and seasons of the ancient liturgical tradition as a great treasure trove of Christian worship, devotion and spiritual formation. In doing so, they embrace an inherently corporate and authentically biblical way of Christian living, which places the Church, rather than the individual, at its center, and union with Christ and his Body as the root of spiritual growth and works of love. In this regard, catholic evangelicals discover in the ancient liturgical tradition a structure, a fleshing out, an embodying of their evangelical quest for a “personal relationship with Jesus” which serves as a corrective to the disembodied, Apollinarian tendencies of traditional evangelical piety.

Third, and for related reasons, catholic evangelicals prize the sacraments and sacramentally centered worship. Weary of vacillating between the twin poles of evangelical rationalism and subjectivism, catholic evangelicals are drawn to the concrete given of the Sacrament in Eucharistic worship and the encounter with Christ that is proffered to them therein. This participatory encounter, which lies at the heart of the ancient liturgical pattern, enables evangelicals to move beyond the mere proclamation of Christ’s substitutionary atonement on the cross, and beyond the principally forensic understanding of the grace of God as a declaration of the forgiveness of guilt, to an apprehension of salvation as a real union with our risen, ascended and reigning Lord Jesus. This union is fundamentally made possible through the Incarnation, upon which the entirety of the Atonement is predicated. In granting supremacy of place to the Lord’s Supper in worship, catholic evangelicals acknowledge the centrality of the Incarnation and through it the redemption in Christ of all created reality. And because the sacraments find their ground and unity in the one true Sacrament, which is our Lord Jesus, catholic evangelicals join their Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and other separated brethren in affirming a true encounter and participation in the real and living Presence of our risen Lord— and therefore a real union with the Holy Trinity—that takes place in Christian worship and, indeed, throughout the whole of the Christian life.

A catholic spirit and posture, a liturgical way of life, and sacramental union and participation in Christ are the core commitments of the catholic dimension of catholic evangelicalism. And out of these flow a groundedness in the Great Tradition, an identification with the church catholic, an inherently corporate understanding of the Christian life, and a robustly incarnational perspective. Surely other commitments and other implications could be added to this list, but these, it seems to me, are primary.

But what of the evangelical aspect of catholic evangelicalism? Given what I have just described, what would prevent a catholic evangelical from following in the footsteps of Tom Howard and Peter Gillquist to join the steady trickle of evangelicals converting to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy? To do so, would be, in effect, to switch from being a catholic evangelical to an evangelical catholic. But would that really be so different?

In answer to this question, we turn to noted evangelical historian David Bebbington, who famously cites four common values which historically have been shared by Anglo-American evangelicals. These are “conversionism, the belief that lives needed to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.”[9] Now I think it’s accurate to say that most catholic evangelicals are no longer exclusively crucicentric in their understanding of the Atonement. And I honestly don’t know how to compare traditional forms of evangelical activism with those of catholic evangelicals—my guess is that they overlap in substantial ways. However, while perhaps more muted and nuanced than in earlier generations, catholic evangelicals continue to place great value upon the bold proclamation of the gospel to those who do not believe and the call to a true conversion of heart and mind to Jesus Christ. And beyond this, there is no question that catholic evangelicals continue to have a most “particular regard for the Bible.”

It is, without question, this high regard for the Bible, for its supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice, for its truthfulness and trustworthiness, for its preaching in Christian worship that continues to distinguish catholic evangelicals as evangelicals. As to authority, the conviction that the authority of Scripture supersedes all ecclesial authority (papal, patriarchal, conciliar or otherwise) continues to place catholic evangelicals squarely in the Protestant camp, and leads them to affirm the Protestant principle of ecclesia semper reformanda—“the church always reforming”—by virtue of which the church in each new generation is called to repent of any way in which it has strayed from the teaching of Scripture.

However, for our purposes, it is the robust emphasis upon the preaching of Scripture in Christian worship that distinguishes catholic evangelicals from their non-evangelical ecumenical counterparts. Contrary to the five-to-ten minute homily that typifies most services of worship among liturgical and sacramental churches, catholic evangelicals continue to prize the sermon, which typically lasts at least twenty to thirty minutes or longer, and usually carries a strong exegetical and exhortative component. For non-evangelicals the “Service of the Word” in Christian worship is often taken to refer to the reading of Scripture—not so with catholic evangelicals. It is the reading and sermonic proclamation of the truth of Scripture that constitutes the service of the Word. And in this respect, catholic evangelicalism again points to its Reformation roots and the Reformed and Lutheran conviction that, in the preaching of Scripture, which is the written Word of God, the living voice of the gospel—the viva vox evangelii—may be heard, the very voice of Christ calling all people to himself.

In light of this, we can see that catholic evangelicals hold firmly to a robust understanding of both Word and Sacrament in Christian worship, each of which in its own way reveals Christ to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. Word and Sacrament, proposition and symbol, speech and act here mutually inform and interpret one another, pointing beyond themselves to the single reality of Jesus our great high priest and mediator, who is himself both our teacher and our sustenance, our Giver and our Gift, the Word and Bread of God.

Catholic, Evangelical and Charismatic

So far, so good. However, I have still to make good on the final component in the title of this paper. And so, we turn to consider the third principal constitutive aspect of Christian worship for many—though by no means all—catholic evangelicals: the charismatic.

Any observer of American Christianity will acknowledge the huge impact made by the birth of Pentecostalism at the dawn of the 20th century, especially upon American evangelicalism. This is most clearly seen in the transdenominational charismatic movement that came out of Pentecostalism and made major inroads into mainstream evangelicalism, initially in the 60s and 70s, but persisting all the way to the present. How to interpret this movement theologically and culturally has been a matter of great interest and often vehement disagreement. But the fact remains that charismatic worship, broadly speaking, has become a mainstay of many American churches across a wide swath of denominations—and not just evangelical churches. The Roman Catholic Church in America has experience its own form of charismatic renewal, though I confess that I know little about it beyond the fact of its existence.

Many catholic evangelicals have also been shaped by this movement. Perhaps best known in this regard is the charismatic revival that issued out of Holy Trinity Brompton, an Anglican church in England in the latter part of the 20th century. While predictably controversial, this revival nonetheless had a great impact upon the Church of England and, indeed, throughout the entire Anglican Communion. That renewal gave birth, among other things, to the Alpha Program, an evangelistic outreach program which, at least in its inception, was structured around an emphasis upon the intervention of the Holy Spirit in the life of the non-Christian or nominal Christian. “HTB,” as Anglicans like to call it, also produced a significant amount of charismatic Christian worship music—I would say “hymnody,” but I'm not sure that's accurate—through the compositions of Graham Kendrick and others, music that would find its way into all but the most traditional of churches.

Thus it is today that in many, many Anglican churches around the world—yes, in Britain and North America but exponentially more so in sub-Saharan Africa (though that is another part of the story)—one will find Anglican churches whose style of worship, while retaining a firm grasp upon both the primacy of preaching and the primacy of the Eucharist, has been dramatically transformed by its charismatic character into something that looks far different than anything Thomas Cranmer might have known. The following are what I understand to be the principal characteristics of that worship.

First, of course, is the music. While this is, in my opinion, the most superficial aspect of charismatic worship, it is nonetheless the aspect often noticed first. While a hymn may sometimes serve to accompany the processional or recessional, the remainder of the music in many charismatic American and British Anglican churches is made up exclusively of contemporary worship songs. These are popular in style, often rudimentary and sometimes heretical in theological content (though I must admit that their content seems to be improving) repetitious in structure, and simplistic in musical structure. And while many liturgical critics of this trend have sounded their tirades about such music over the years, almost invariably they miss the essential purpose for which such music has been created—for encounter. The truth is that much of contemporary worship music, with its simple, repetitive lyrics and melodies, most closely resembles not pop music but a contemporary form of chant. And the purpose of chant is to draw the mind and heart of the worshiper into meditation upon and encounter with the Spirit of the living God. That this is so explains why the music of Taize is so often to be found blended with the more common “worship songs.” Both seek the goal of drawing the worshiper into a deep awareness of the presence of God in the midst of His people—though I think Taize does it better!

It is this emphasis upon encounter with the real presence of the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit that lies at the heart of charismatic worship. And for charismatic catholic evangelicals, that presence is encountered not only in Body and Blood of our Lord and not only in the living Word of the sermon, but indeed throughout the whole of Christian worship. Rather than a locus of encounter with God, charismatic worship consists essentially of a spiritual posture of openness to encountering God, an opening of mind and heart, often signified by a raising of head and hands, to receive the Holy Spirit and be embraced by the love of God. For some, the adoption of this spiritual posture in Christian worship may lead to speaking in tongues, for others it may result in weeping in joy or in repentance; but whatever the outcome, the spiritual posture is the same: an openness to the Holy Spirit that leads to encounter with the risen Christ.

And with this openness comes a third characteristic of charismatic worship: freedom. One of the consistent features of charismatic worship, regardless of denomination or tradition, is a marked freedom to respond to the Holy Spirit in whatever manner one is led. While this has undoubtedly led to abuses in the past, for catholic evangelicals such freedom is constrained and shaped by the structure of the liturgy. This by no means eliminates that freedom; indeed, for many charismatic catholic evangelicals, that sense of freedom and openness to the Holy Spirit suffuses their experience of the liturgy with a remarkable sense of the presence and power of the Lord. Moreover, this freedom serves, at least to some degree, as an antidote to the liturgical formalism, ecclesial traditionalism and nominal Christianity that so often crop up in liturgical and sacramental traditions.

In light of these few common features of charismatic catholic evangelical worship—and I'm sure that others could and should be identified—I now regularly speak of “three streams” Anglicanism[10] in which catholic, evangelical and charismatic elements converge to produce a type of Christian worship that is rooted in the Great Tradition, informed by the preaching of Scripture, and suffused with the presence of the Holy Spirit. For the same reason, when introducing Anglican liturgy to our parishioners, I no longer limit my discussion to the traditional structure Word and Sacrament, but now speak of Word, Sacrament and Spirit as essential components of Christian worship. For whether one is charismatic or not, surely this simply true.

A New Way of Witness

In what sense, then, may we identify the convergence of these three streams in charismatic catholic evangelicalism as a “new way of witness,” both to those who are not Christian and to those who hail from non-evangelical traditions? That it is new is without question; that it is a “way” is evinced by the explosion of charismatic Anglicanism in the developing world today, and its more modest but steady growth among American evangelicals. In this regard, I think it fair to say that the future of catholic evangelicalism is an Anglican one, and a charismatic Anglican one at that.

But how is it a witness? Insofar as this movement is actively bringing people into the Christian faith—and in parts of the world it is doing so in huge large numbers—then the question of its witness to the Gospel is easily answered.

But what of its witness to other Christian traditions? To my mind comes my friend Nikki, a member of our church who was raised Greek Orthodox, but had no living faith and lived a rebellious life in her youth until she met the man who was to become her husband. He, by contrast, was a staunchly evangelical Dutch Reformed Christian who had attended Calvin College. In the course of their friendship, courtship and subsequent marriage, Nikki experienced a genuine spiritual awakening but could not bring herself to embrace her husband's Dutch Reformed heritage. After much searching, the couple stumbled upon our church and found, to their delight, a place where his penchant for sound exegetical preaching and her passion for the Eucharist could be satisfied. Little did Nikki anticipate that, in the process, she would also become charismatic. Virtually any given Sunday, I can look across the sanctuary to find her, especially during the music at communion, standing with hands raised and eyes closed in worship, and with tears streaming down her face. Though no surprise to me, Nikki recently confided in me that she has begun to read the Greek fathers, figures whose names she has heard from her infancy, and was shocked to discover that she “can't get enough of them!”

The convergence of catholic, evangelical and charismatic modes of Christian worship is a gift to all Christian churches. It establishes a clearing, a crossroads, a meeting of tributaries that allows Christians—many of them disaffected from their traditions of origin (we get a lot of disaffected Roman Catholics at our church)—to find a place within the panoply of traditions that may be called Christian. In that place Christians of vastly differing backgrounds may encounter the living presence of the Triune God, perhaps in a way they had never known possible. And they may choose to take up residence where they are, to follow another tributary to its source, or ultimately to turn and retrace their steps in the direction from whence they came. Whatever the outcome, I believe they will be left with a deeper knowledge of Scripture, a deeper appreciation of the sacramental and liturgical riches of the ancient Christian tradition, and a deeper awareness of the Church as a living temple of God's Holy Spirit. And I believe that they will be given a vision of the ultimate unity in Christ in which all Christian traditions participate, their divisions notwithstanding. But most of all, I believe and sincerely hope that they will be awakened to a personal knowledge of real spiritual union with the living God in and through our great high priest and mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

↑ Whether we can call this another “Reformation” is yet to be seen, though, some—perhaps most notably Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom—wonder if it might signify the end of the Reformation and the birth of a new orthodox ecumenism and ecclesial rapprochement.

↑Catholic evangelicals may also be found in positions of influence in other key evangelical institutions. The publisher, editor-in-chief, and all three managing editors of Christianity Today are Anglican, and over half of the editorial department of InterVarsity Press is Anglican. Interestingly enough, IVP's most recent addition to the editorial team is a Roman Catholic.